SAY Sí, a downtown organization that promotes the arts to local youth, turns 20 this month.

During the past two decades, the tuition-free program's annual enrollment has grown from 12 to more than 200 kids, 100 percent of whom have graduated from high school and gone on to secondary education. Spokesman Stephen Guzman said the program welcomes students from “all walks of life” and has a student body that is 60 percent low-income.

“If a student has an idea or a dream, we're here to get those students to make it happen,” said Guzman, adding that SAY Sí aims to fill the gap as art departments in public schools dwindle.

“Believe it or not, arts were being cut in 1994 just like they are today,” he said. “It's really sad.”

SAY Sí's curriculum includes workshops in artistic media from painting and sculpting to an in-house theater troupe. According to Guzman, the program's alumni have gone on to far-off schools such as Emerson in Boston, the School of Visual Art-New York and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, as well as in-state universities, including UT-Austin and UTSA.

Pablo Véliz, 31, is a local filmmaker who passed through SAY Sí in the late 1990s. A West Side native who moved to San Antonio from Sabinas Hidalgo, Mexico, with his family at age 10, Véliz said he wasn't planning on the arts becoming a part of his life — until he found SAY Sí.

“I was a typical West Side kid whose highest aspirations were to be a truck driver,” said Véliz, who heard about the program when SAY Sí made a recruiting trip to Jefferson High School.

“I show up, and it's just this informal classroom with paint, paper,” Véliz added. “But SAY Sí provided this unusual validation, that you could live as an artist — that you could create something with your hands and mind that someone else would value enough to pay you for.”

Véliz said he sold his first watercolor for $85 and eventually sold other works for as much as $1,000 while still in high school. He went on to study fine art and communication at UTSA and has since produced a number of TV commercials, advertisements and seven films, one of which was accepted into the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

“This is surreal,” Véliz said. “You can transform dreams into solid materials. I have lived my life as an artist, and all from this one little time I picked up a paintbrush.”

Guzman said SAY Sí's 20th anniversary celebration kicks off with its Youth Arts Education Advocacy Awards ceremony Thursday, March 6, along with the Small Scale silent auction on March 21. The auction is the biggest fundraising event of the year for SAY Sí, which is part of the King William Cultural Arts District and relies largely on donations and art sales for funding.